Reviewing the experience with the repatriation of sacred ceremonial objects: A comparative legal analysis of Canada and South Africa
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Recent global interest in preserving cultural identity and heritage for the future of previously colonized Indigenous groups has prompted the resuscitation of local and Indigenous cultures from the brink of extinction. The pertinence of protecting and managing cultural heritage as an endowment that transcends generations of people and serves as a ligature between their past, present, and future cannot be overstated. In this respect, the repatriation or restitution of sacred ceremonial objects (SCOs) and cultural artifacts constitutes an integral aspect of reviving Indigenous people’s cultural and living heritage, which has been eroded by colonialism and other forms of occupation. In Alberta, Canada, the First Nations Sacred Ceremonial Objects Repatriation Act is the foremost legislation that provides a formal mechanism for the return of SCOs to the First Nations. Thus far, it has successfully facilitated the repatriation of several hundred repatriated several SCOs. In contrast, South Africa’s primary heritage legislation, the National Heritage Resources Act, lacks direction and detail on the restitution of SCOs, specifically to cultural communities. With the aid of a comparative approach, this article critically examines one successful approach to the repatriation of specific sets of heritage objects in Canada and analyzes South Africa’s legal frameworks that consider SCOs as a component of its national estate within its framework for restitution and the promotion of cultural revival in cultural communities.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.013 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.064 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".